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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

So won't you smile for the cameraI know they're gonna love youPeg

I spent the last week in The Dam.

(In case you didn't know, ^^^that is The Dam, by the by.

It had been too long since I came home.

I have a ton of clients in Wisconsin, and a ton of friends.

It will never again be longer than a year before I come back home.

The Dad picked me up from the airport.

We went around the corner and saw Josh at the Ale Asylum.

I saw Tony, Kris and Alison on Thursday. Kris is in love, which is nice to see.

Friday, I met some people out in Madison.

Tom Doepke surprised me on Saturday.

He was all jacked up, "Dude, Dude, Dude, I got the sweet hook-up!!"

I had plans to meet Tom at Alex Smith's for a jam session.

I said, "What?"

I HAVE FREE BOX SEATS TO SEE STEELY DAN PLAY THE ROYAL SCAM AT THE RIVERSIDE IN MILWAUKEE!

5 Comments:

Great to see you and would like to make it more than sort of annual.I do owe you a trip out and hope to be doing that when things work out for that to happen and you come down from the mountain in the late spirng to early summer.Be in touch !!Laters

I went to a guitar clinic that Jeff "Skunk" Baxter gave at a Guitar Center back in the 90s. He said The Dan would do lock-ins at the studio and they would have lines of hot shot pro guitarists take turns laying down lines over and over and becker and Fagen would stare at them through the studio window and reject the takes one after another and make the guitarists play the same line over and over and over while they would do stuff like move mics 1/16" at a time and have the techs switch out ridiculous things like speaker wires and wiring in the recording console because they claimed they could hear shit that nobody else could, and nobody could leave until it was perfect. The hard work paid off, their records are pristine.

Interestingly, I have a vinyl copy of Katy Lied that has a severe defect in it's pressing, the last song on Side 1 (Dr. Wu) was cut to the record at an incorrect pitch, it's a whole step (2 frets) sharp compared to cd and mp3, and is very noticable. It's odd they would let such a glaring error to get out, but upon further research I found out that The Dan refused to listen to that Katy Lied album for years because of a faulty DBX noise reduction unit that only they could hear. One early version of the bad pressing got out into the marketplace.

I guess it pays to be all coked-out when recording an album, the shit gets done over an over until it's PERFECT.

The time in the above comment where I told you about seeing Jeff Skunk Baxter give a guitar clinic at the end he chose a name and the winner got some sort of sweet hollowbody Epiphone electric autographed by Skunk. I don't know the model.

A year or two after that I was at a laundromat doing laundry and I looked on the bulletin board and that Skunk baxter autographed Epiphone was for sale. That's bad karma to sell something you won.